The Place of Will, Intellect and Feeling in Prayer

99THE psychology of religious experience, as yet so little understood, has few more important problems proposed to it than that which concerns the true place and right use of will, intellect, and feeling in prayer. This question, which to some may appear merely academic, really involves the whole problem of the method and proportion in which the various powers and activities of our being may best be used, when they turn from the natural world of concrete things to attend to the so-called "supernatural" world of Spirit — in fact, to God, Who is the source and sum of the reality of that world. That problem must be of practical interest to every Christian — more, to every one who believes in the spiritual possibilities of man — for it concerns itself with all those responses which are made by human personality to the impact of Infinite Life. It deals, in Maeterlinck's words, with " the harshest and most uninhabitable headlands of the Divine 'know thyself,'" and includes in its span the whole region "where the psychology of man mingles with the psychology of God."

In the first place, what do we mean by prayer? Surely just this: that part of our active and conscious life which is deliberately orientated towards, and exclusively responds to, spiritual reality. The Being of God, Who is that spiritual reality, we believe to be immanent in all things: "He is not far from each one of us: for in Him we live, and move, and have our being." In fact, as Christians we must believe100this. Therefore in attending to those visible and concrete things, we are in a way attending to that immanent God; and in this sense all honest work is indeed, as the old proverb says, a sort of prayer. But when we speak of prayer as a separate act or activity of the self, we mean more than this. We mean, in fact, as a rule the other aspect of spiritual experience and communion; in the language of theology, attention to transcendent rather than to immanent Reality. Prayer, says Walter Hilton, in terms of which the origin goes back to the Neoplatonists, "is nothing else but an ascending or getting up of the desire of the heart into God, by withdrawing it from all earthly thoughts" — an ascent, says Ruysbroeck, of the Ladder of Love. In the same spirit William Law defines it as "the rising of the soul out of the vanity of time into the riches of eternity." It entails, then, a going up or out from our ordinary circle of earthly interests; a cutting off, so far as we may, of the "torrent of use and wont," that we may attend to the changeless Reality which that flux too often hides. Prayer stretches out the tentacles of our consciousness not so much towards that Divine Life which is felt to be enshrined within the striving, changeful world of things; but rather to that "Eternal truth, true Love, and loved Eternity" wherein the world is felt to be enshrined; and in this act it brings to full circle the activities of the human soul — that

"Swinging-wicket set between

The Unseen and the Seen."

The whole of man's life really consists in a series of balanced responses to this Transcendent-Immanent Reality; because man lives under two orders, is at once a citizen of Eternity and of Time. Like a pendulum, his consciousness moves perpetually — or should move if it be healthy — between God and his neighbour, between this world and that. The wholeness, sanity, and balance of his existence will entirely depend101upon the perfection of his adjustment to this double situation; on the steady alternating beat of his outward swing of adoration, his homeward-turning swing of charity. Now, it is the outward swing which we are to consider: the powers that may be used in it, the best way in which these powers may be employed.

First, we observe that those three capacities or faculties which we have under consideration — the thinking faculty, the feeling faculty, the willing or acting faculty — practically cover all the ways in which the self can react to other selves and other things. From their combination come all the possibilities of self-expression which are open to man. In his natural life he needs and uses all of them. Shall he need and use all of them in his spiritual life too? Christians, I think, are bound to answer this question in the affirmative. According to Christianity, it is the whole self which is called to turn towards Divine Reality — to enter the Kingdom — not some supposed "spiritual" part thereof. "Thou hast made us for Thyself," said Augustine; not, as the Orphic initiate would have said, "Thou hast made one crumb out of our complex nature for Thyself, and the rest may go on to the rubbish heap." It is the whole man of intellect, of feeling, and of will, which finds its only true objective in the Christian God.

Surely, the real difference which marks out Christianity from all other religions lies just here; in this robust acceptance of humanity in its wholeness, and of life in its completeness, as something which is susceptible of the Divine. It demands, and deals with, the whole man, his Titanic energies and warring instincts; not, as did the antique mysteries, separating and cultivating some supposed transcendental principle in him, to the exclusion of all else. Christians believe in a God immanent and incarnate, Who transfuses the whole of the life which He has created, and calls that life in its wholeness to union with Him. If this be so, then Lex credendi, lex orandi; our102belief should find its fullest expression in our prayer, and that prayer should take up, and turn towards the spiritual order all the powers of our mental, emotional, and volitional life. Prayer should be the highest exercise of these powers; for here they are directed to the only adequate object of thought, of love, and of desire. It should, as it were, lift us to the top of our condition, and represent the fullest flowering of our consciousness; for here we breathe the air of the supernal order, and attain according to our measure to that communion with Reality for which we were made.

Prayer so thought of will include, of course, many different kinds of spiritual work; and also — what is too often forgotten — the priceless gift of spiritual rest. It will include many kinds of intercourse with Reality — adoration, petition, meditation, contemplation — and all the shades and varieties of these which religious writers have named and classified. As in the natural order the living creature must feed and grow, must suffer and enjoy, must get energy from the external world and give it back again in creative acts, if he would live a whole and healthy life, so, too, in the spiritual order. All these things — the giving and the receiving, the work and the rest — should fall within the circle of prayer.

Now, when we do anything consciously and with purpose, the transition from inaction to action unfolds itself in a certain order. First we form a concept of that which we shall do; the idea of it looms up, dimly or distinctly, in the mind. Then, we feel that we want to do it, or must do it. Then we determine that we will do it. These phases may follow one another so swiftly that they seem to us to be fused into one; but when we analyze the process which lies behind each conscious act, we find that this is the normal sequence of development. First we think, then we feel, then we will. This little generalization must not be pressed too hard; but it is broadly true, and gives us a starting-point from which to trace out the way in which the three main powers of the self act in prayer. It103is practically important, as well as psychologically interesting, to know how they act or should act; as it is practically important to know, at least in outline, the normal operation of our bodily powers. Self-knowledge, said Richard of St. Victor, is the beginning of the spiritual life; and knowledge of one's self — too often identified with knowledge of one's sins — ought to include some slight acquaintance with the machinery we all have at our disposal. This machinery, as we see, falls into three divisions; and the perfection of the work which it does will depend upon the observing of an order in their operation, a due balance between them, without excessive development of one power at the expense of the others.

On the side of spiritual experience and activity, such an excessive and one-sided development often takes place. Where this exaggeration is in the direction of intellect, the theological or philosophical mood dominates all other aspects of religion. Where the purely emotional and instinctive side of the relation of the soul to God is released from the critical action of the intelligence, it often degenerates into an objectionable sentimentality, and may lead to forms of self-indulgence which are only superficially religious. Where the volitional element takes command, unchecked by humble love, an arrogant reliance upon our own powers, a restless determination to do certain hard things, to attain certain results — a sort of supersensual ambition — mars the harmony of the inner life. Any of these exaggerations must mean loss of balance, loss of wholeness; and their presence in the active life reflects back to their presence in the prayerful life, of which outward religion is but the visible sign. I think, therefore, that we ought to regard it as a part of our religious education to study the order in which our faculties should be employed when we turn towards our spiritual inheritance.

Prayer, as a rule — save with those natural or highly trained contemplatives who live always in the prayerful state, tuned104up to a perpetual consciousness of spiritual reality — begins, or should begin, with something which we can only call an intellectual act; with thinking of what we arc going to do. In saying this, I am not expressing a merely personal opinion. All those great specialists of the spiritual life who have written on this subject are here in agreement. "When thou goest about to pray," says Walter Hilton, "first make and frame betwixt thee and God a full purpose and intention; then begin, and do as well as thou canst." "Prayer," says the writer of the Cloud of Unknowing, "may not goodly be gotten in beginners or proficients, without thinking coming before." All mediaeval writers on prayer take it as a matter of course that "meditation" comes before " orison"; and meditation is simply the art of thinking steadily and methodically about spiritual things. So, too, the most modern psychologists assure us that instinctive emotion does its best work when it acts in harmony with our reasoning powers.

St. Teresa, again, insists passionately on the primal need of thinking what we are doing when we begin to pray; on "recollecting the mind," calling in the scattered thoughts, and concentrating the intellect upon the business in hand. It is, in fact, obvious — once we consider the matter in a practical light — that we must form some conception of the supernal intercourse which we are going to attempt, and of the parties to it; though if our prayer be real, that conception will soon be transcended. The sword of the spirit is about to turn in a new direction; away from concrete actualities, towards eternal realities. This change — the greatest of which our consciousness is capable — must be realized as fully as possible by the self whose powers of will and love it will call into play. It seems necessary to insist on this point, because so much is said now, and no doubt rightly said, about the non-intellectual and supremely intuitional nature of the spiritual life; with the result that some people begin to think it their duty to cultivate a kind of pious imbecility. There is a notion in the105air that when man turns to God he ought to leave his brains behind him. True, they will soon be left behind of necessity if man goes far on the road towards that Reality which is above all reason and all knowledge; for spirit in the swiftness of its flight to God quickly overpasses these imperfect instruments. But those whose feet are still firmly planted upon earth gain nothing by anticipating this moment; they will not attain to spiritual intuition by the mere annihilation of their intelligence. We cannot hope to imitate the crystalline simplicity of the saints; a simplicity which is the result, not of any deliberate neglect of reason, but of clearest vision, of intensest trust, of most ardent love — that is, of Faith, Hope, and Charity in their most perfect expression, fused together to form a single state of enormous activity. But this is no reason why we should put imbecility, deliberate vagueness, or a silly want of logic in the place of their exquisite simpleness; any more than we should dare to put an unctuous familiarity in the place of their wonderful intimacy, or a cringing demeanour in the place of their matchless humility.

In saying this — in insisting that the reason has a well-marked and necessary place in the mechanism of the soul's approach to God — I am not advocating a religious intellectualism. It is true that our perception of all things, even the most divine, is conditioned by the previous content of our minds: the "apperceiving mass." Hence, the more worthy our thoughts about God, the more worthy our apprehensions of Him are likely to be. Yet I know that there is in the most apparently foolish prayer of feeling something warmly human, and therefore effective; something which in its value for life far transcends the consecrated sawdust offered up by devout intellectualism. "By love," said the old mystic, "He may be gotten and holden; by thought never." A whole world of experience separates the simple little church mouse saying her rosary, perhaps without much intelligence, yet with a humble and a loving faith, from the bishop who106preferred "Oh, Great First Cause" to "Our Father," because he thought that it was more in accordance with scientific truth; and few of us will feel much doubt as to the side on which the advantage lies. The advantage must always lie with those "full true sisters," humility and love; for these are the essential elements of all successful prayer. But surely it is a mistake to suppose that these qualities cannot exist side by side with an active and disciplined intelligence?

Prayer, then, begins by an intellectual adjustment. By thinking of God, or of Spiritual Reality, earnestly and humbly, and to the exclusion of other objects of thought; by deliberately surrendering the mind to spiritual things; by preparing the consciousness for the impact of a new order, the inflow of new life. But, having thought of God, the self, if it stop there, is no more in touch with Him than it was before. It may think as long as it likes, but nothing happens; thought unhelped by feeling ever remains exterior to its object. We are brought up short against the fact that the intellect is an essentially static thing: we cannot think our way along the royal road which leads to heaven.

Yet it is a commonplace of spiritual knowledge that, if the state of prayer be established, something does happen; consciousness does somehow travel along that road, the field of perception is shifted, new contacts are made. How is this done? A distinguished religious psychologist has answered, that it is done "by the synthesis of love and will" — that is to say, by the craving in action which conditions all our essential deeds — and I know no better answer to suggest.

Where the office of thought ends, there the office of will and feeling begins: "Where intellect must stay without," says Ruysbroeck, "these may enter in." Desire and intention are the most dynamic of our faculties; they do work. They are the true explorers of the Infinite, the instruments of our ascents to God. Reason comes to the foot of the mountain; it is the industrious will urged by the passionate heart which107climbs the slope. It is the "blind intent stretching towards Him," says the Cloud of Unknowing, "the true lovely will of the heart," which succeeds at last; the tense determination, the effort, the hard work, the definite, eager, humble, outward thrust of the whole personality towards a Reality which is felt rather than known. "We are nothing else but wills," said St. Augustine. "The will," said William Law, "maketh the beginning, the middle, and the end of everything. It is the only workman in nature, and everything is its work." Experience endorses this emphasis on will and desire as the central facts of our personality, the part of us which is supremely our own. In turning that will and desire towards Spiritual Reality, we are doing all that we can of ourselves; are selecting one out of the sheaf-like tendencies of our complex nature, and deliberately concentrating upon it our passion and our power. Also, we are giving consciously, whole-heartedly, with intention, that with which we are free to deal; and self-donation is, we know, an essential part of prayer, as of all

true intercourse.

Now, intellect and feeling are not wholly ours to give. A rich mental or emotional life is not possessed of all men; some are naturally stupid, some temperamentally cold. Even those who are greatly endowed with the powers of understanding or of love have not got these powers entirely under their own control. Both feeling and intellect often insist on taking their own line with us. Moreover, they fluctuate from day to day, from hour to hour; they arc dependent on many delicate adjustments. Sometimes we are mentally dull, sometimes we are emotionally flat: and this happens more often, perhaps, in regard to spiritual than in regard to merely human affairs. On such occasions it is notoriously useless to try to beat ourselves up to a froth: to make our-selves think more deeply or make ourselves care more intensely. Did the worth of man's prayerful life depend on the maintenance of a constant high level of feeling or understanding, he108were in a parlous case. But, though these often seem to fail him — and with them all the joy of spiritual intercourse fails him too — the regnant will remains. Even when his heart is cold and his mind is dim, the "blind intent stretching to God" is still possible to him. "Our wills are ours, to make them Thine."

The Kingdom of Heaven, says the Gospel, is taken by violence — that is, by effort, by unfaltering courage — not by cleverness, nor by ecstatic spiritual feelings. The freedom of the City of God is never earned by a mere limp acquiescence in those great currents of the transcendent order which bear life towards its home. The determined fixing of the will upon Spiritual Reality, and pressing towards that Reality steadily and without deflection; this is the very centre of the art of prayer. This is why those splendid psychologists, the mediaeval writers on prayer, told their pupils to "mean only God," and not to trouble about anything else; since "He who has Him has all." The most theological of thoughts soon becomes inadequate; the most spiritual of emotions is only a fair-weather breeze. Let the ship take advantage of it by all means, but not rely on it. She must be prepared to beat to windward if she would reach her goal. [EU was a competent sailor from her childhood. DCW]

In proportion to the strength and sincerity of the will, in fact, so shall be the measure of success in prayer. As the self pushes out towards Reality, so does Reality rush in on it. "Grace and the will," says one of the greatest of living writers on religion, "rise and fall together." "Grace" is, of course, the theological term for that inflow of spiritual vitality which is the response made by the divine order to the human motions of adoration, supplication, and love; and according to the energy and intensity with which our efforts are made — the degree in which we concentrate our attention upon this high and difficult business of prayer — will be the amount of new life that we receive. The efficacy of prayer, therefore, will be conditioned by the will of the praying self. "Though109it be so, that prayer be not the cause of grace," says Hilton, "nevertheless it is a way or means by which grace freely given comes into the soul." Grace presses in upon life perpetually, and awaits our voluntary appropriation of it. It is accessible to sincere and loyal endeavour, to " the true lovely will of the heart," and to nothing else.

So much we have said of will. What place have we left for the operation of feeling in prayer? It is not easy to disentangle will and feeling; for in all intense will there is a strong element of emotion — every volitional act has somewhere at the back of it a desire — and in all great and energizing passions there is a pronounced volitional element. The "synthesis of love and will "is no mere fancy of the psychologist. It is a compound hard to break down in practice. But I think we can say generally that the business of feeling is to inflame the will, to give it intention, gladness, and vividness; to convert it from a dull determination into an eager, impassioned desire. It links up thought with action; effects, in psychological language, the movement of the prayerful self from a mere state of cognition to a state of conation; converts the soul from attention to the Transcendent to first-hand adventure within it. "All thy life now behoveth altogether to stand in desire," says the author of the Cloud of Unknowing to the disciple who has accepted the principle of prayer; and here he is declaring a psychological necessity rather than a religious platitude, for all successful action has its origin in emotion of some kind. Though we choose to imagine that "pure reason" directs our conduct, in the last resort we always do a thing because of the feeling that we have about it. Not necessarily because we like doing it; but because instinctive feeling of some sort — selfish or unselfish, personal, social, conventional, sacrificial; the disturbing emotion called the sense of duty, or the glorious emotion called the passion of love — is urging us to it. Instinctive emotions, more or less sublimated; Love, Hatred, Ambition, Fear, Anger, Hunger,110Patriotism, Self-interest; these are the true names of our reasons for doing things.

If this be true of our reactions to the physical world, it is none the less true of our intercourse with the spiritual world. The will is moved to seek that intercourse by emotion, by feeling; never by a merely intellectual conviction. In the vigour and totality with which the heroes of religion give themselves to spiritual interests, and in the powers which they develop, we see the marks of instinctive feeling operating upon the highest levels. By "a leash of longing," says the Cloud of Unknowing again, man is led to be the servant of God; not by the faultless deductions of dialectic, but by the mysterious logic of the heart. He is moved most often, perhaps, by an innate unformulated craving for perfection, or by the complementary loathing of imperfection — a love of God, or a hatred of self — by the longing for peace, the miserable sensations of disillusion, of sin, and of unrest, the heart's deep conviction that it needs a changeless object for its love. Or, if by none of these, then by some other emotional stimulus.

A wide range of feeling states — some, it is true, merely self-seeking, but others high and pure — influence the prayerful consciousness; but those which are normal and healthy fall within two groups, one of subjective, the other of objective emotion. The dominant motive of the subjective group is the self's feeling of its own imperfection, helplessness, sinfulness, and need, over against the Perfect Reality towards which its prayer is set; a feeling which grows with the growth

of the soul's spiritual perceptions, and includes all the shaded emotions of penitence and of humility. "For meekness in itself is naught else but a true knowing and feeling of a man's self as he is." The objective group of feelings is complementary to this, and is centred on the goodness, beauty, and perfection of that Infinite Reality towards which the soul is stretching itself. Its dominant notes are adoration and love. Of these two fundamental emotions — humility and love —111the first lies at the back of all prayer of confession and petition, and is a necessary check upon the arrogant tendencies of the will. The second is the energizing cause of all adoration: adoration, the highest exercise of the spirit of man. Prayer, then, on its emotional side should begin in humble contrition and flower in loving adoration. Adoring love — not mere emotional excitement, religious sentimentality or " spiritual feelings " — but the strong, deep love, industrious, courageous and self-giving which fuses all the powers of the self into one single state of enormous intensity; this is the immortal element of prayer. Thought has done all that it may when it has set the scene, prepared the ground, adjusted the mind in the right direction. Will is wanted only whilst there are oppositions to be transcended, difficult things to be done. It represents the soul's effort and struggle to be where it ought to be. But there are levels of attainment in which the will does not seem to exist any more as a separate thing. It is caught in the mighty rhythms of the Divine will, merged in it and surrendered to it. Instead of its small personal activity, it forms a part of the great deep action of the Whole. In the higher degrees of prayer, in fact, will is transmuted into love. We are reminded of the old story of the phcenix: the active busy will seems to be burned up and utterly destroyed, but living love, strong and immortal, springs from the ashes and the flame. When the reasonable hope and the deliberate wilful faith in which man's prayer began are both fulfilled, this heavenly charity goes on to lose itself upon the heights.

Within the normal experience of the ordinary Christian, love should give two things to prayer; ardour and beauty. In his prayer, as it were, man swings a censer before the altar of the Universe. He may put into the thurible all his thoughts and dreams, all his will and energy. But unless the fire of love is communicated to that incense, nothing will happen; there will be no fragrance and no ascending smoke. These qualities — ardour and beauty — represent two distinct types112of feeling, which ought both to find a place in the complete spiritual life, balancing and completing one another. The first is in the highest degree intimate and personal; the second is disinterested and aesthetic.

The intimate and personal aspect of spiritual love has found supreme literary expression in the works of Richard of St. Victor, of St. Bernard, of Thomas a Kempis, of our own Richard Rolle, Hilton, and Julian of Norwich, and many others. We see it in our own day in its purest form in the living mystic who wrote The Golden Fountain. Those who discredit it as "mere religious emotionalism " do so because they utterly mistake its nature; regarding it, apparently, as the spiritual equivalent of the poorest and most foolish, rather than the noblest, most heroic, and least self-seeking, types of human love. "I find the lark the most wonderful of all birds," says the author of The Golden Fountain. "I cannot listen to his rhapsodies without being inspired (no matter what I may be in the midst of doing or saying) to throw up my own love to God. In the soaring insistence of his song and passion I find the only thing in Nature which so suggests the high soaring and rapturous flights of the soul. But I am glad that we surpass the lark in sustaining a far more lengthy and wonderful flight; and that we sing, not downwards to an earthly love, but upwards to a heavenly." Like real human love, this spiritual passion is poles asunder from every kind of sentimentality. It is profoundly creative, it is self-giving, it does not ask for anything in exchange. Although it is the source of the highest kind of joy — though, as à Kempis says, the true lover "flies, runs, and rejoices; is free, and cannot be restrained" — it has yet more kinship with suffering than with merely agreeable emotions. This is the feeling state, at once generous and desirous, which most of all enflames the will and makes it active; this it is which gives ardour and reality to man's prayers. " For love is born of God, and cannot rest save in God, above all created things."113But there is another form of objective emotion besides this intimate and personal passion of love, which ought to play an important part in the life of prayer. I mean that exalted and essentially disinterested type of feeling which expresses itself in pure adoration, and is closely connected with the sense of the Beautiful. Surely this, since it represents the fullest expression of one power in our nature — and that a power which is persistently stretched out in the direction of the Ideal — should have a part in our communion with the spiritual, as well as with the natural world. The Beautiful, says Hegel, is the spiritual making itself known sensuously. It represents, then, a direct message to us from the heart of Reality; ministers to us of more abundant life. Therefore the widening of our horizon which takes place when we turn in prayer to a greater world than that which the senses reveal to us, should bring with it a more poignant vision of loveliness, a more eager passion for Beauty as well as for Goodness and Truth. When St. Augustine strove to express the intensity of his regret for wasted years, it was to his neglect of the Beauty of God that he went to show the poignancy of his feeling, the immensity of his loss. " Oh Beauty so old and so new! too late have I loved thee!"

It needs a special training, I think — a special and deliberate use of our faculties — if we are to avoid this deprivation; and learn, as an integral part of our communion with Reality, to lay hold of the loveliness of the First and Only Fair. " I was caught up to Thee by Thy beauty, but dragged back again by my own weight," says Augustine in another place; and the weight of the soul, he tells us, is its love — the pull of a misplaced desire. All prayer which is primarily the expression of our wants rather than our worship, which places the demand for daily bread before instead of after the hallowing of the Ineffable Name, will have this dragging-back effect.

Now, as the artist's passion for sensuous beauty finds expression in his work, and urges him to create beauty as well as114he can, so too the soul's passion for spiritual beauty should find expression in its work; that is to say, in its prayer. A work of art, says Hegel again, is as much the work of the Spirit of God as is the beauty of Nature; but in art the Holy Spirit works through human consciousness. Therefore man's prayer ought to be as beautiful as he can make it; for thus it approaches more nearly to the mind of God. It should have dignity as well as intimacy, form as well as colour. More, all those little magic thoughts — those delicate winged fancies, which seem like birds rejoicing in God's sight — these, too, should have their place in it. We find many specimens of them, as it were stuffed and preserved under glass shades, in books of devotion. It is true that their charm and radiance cannot survive this process; the colour now seems crude, the sheen of the plumage is gone. But once these were the living, personal, spontaneous expressions of the love and faith — the inborn poetry — of those from whom they came. Many a liturgic prayer, which now seems to us impersonal and official — foreign to us, perhaps, in its language and thought — will show us, if we have but a little imaginative sympathy, the ardent mood, the exquisite tact, the unforced dignity, of the mind which first composed it; and form a standard by which we may measure our own efforts in this kind.

But the beauty which we seek to incorporate into our spiritual intercourse should not be the dead ceremonious beauty which comes of mere dependence on tradition. It should be the freely upspringing lyric beauty which is rooted in intense personal feeling; the living beauty of a living thing. Nor need we fear the reproach that here we confuse religion with poetry. Poetry ever goes like the royal banners before ascending life; therefore man may safely follow its leadership in his prayer, which is — or should be — life in its intensest form. Consider the lilies: those perfect examples of a measured, harmonious, natural and creative life, under a form of utmost loveliness. I cannot help thinking that it is the115duty of all Christians to impart something of that flower-like beauty to their prayer; and only feeling of a special kind will do it — that humble yet passionate love of the beautiful, which finds the perfect object of its adoration in God and something of His fairness in all created things. St. Francis had it strongly, and certain other of the mystics had it too. In one of his rapturous meditations, Suso, for whom faith and poetry were — as they should be — fused in one, calls the Eternal Wisdom a " sweet and beautiful wild flower." He recognized that flowery charm which makes the Gospels fragrant, and is included in that pattern which Christians are called to imitate if they can. Now, if this quality is to be manifested in human life, it must first be sought and actualized, consciously or unconsciously, in prayer; because it is in the pure, sharp air of the spiritual order that it lives. It must spring up from within outwards, must be the reflection of the soul's communion with "that Supreme Beauty which containeth in itself all goodness"; which was revealed to Angela of Foligno, but which "she could in no wise describe." The intellect may, and should, conceive of this Absolute Beauty as well as it can; the will may — and must — be set on the attaining of it. But only by intuitive feeling can man hope to know it, and only by love can he make it his own. The springs of the truest prayer and of the deepest poetry — twin expressions of man's outward-going passion for that Eternity which is his home — rise very near together in the heart.